For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.

The tropes of bondage that pervade Emily Dickinson’s lyric poems were significant to contemporary American accounts of the lyric and its relation to individual liberty. Dickinson is often held up as the paradigmatic lyric poet: reclusive, but unbounded in her imagination; pure voice, speaking on the other side of the door. Dickinson herself returns endlessly to tropes of the prison, chains and bonds. At times she even expresses a sadistic delight in imagining the torture of others. The chapter argues that, given the convulsions of her time and her family’s direct political engagements with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Civil War, it is surprising that slavery is almost entirely absent from Dickinson’s poetry. The chapter reflects on the tropes of incarceration or bondage in Dickinson’s poetics, to consider what the missing slave means for the model of lyric that she has come to represent.

Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.

Chapter 5 examines the gendered dimensions of maroon communities in America and the wider Atlantic world. Fugitive women joined maroon societies with their husbands and other family members. Runaways were a constant source of anxiety and fear. In the Caribbean and places such as Georgia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast and along the perimeter of the Virginia and North Carolina border in an area known as the Great Dismal Swamp, they were successful in establishing maroon societies. Such societies maintained their cohesiveness for many years. Given that the woods and swamps were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, fugitive women had more freedom in these spaces. The Revolutionary War not only prompted an increase in the number of runaways, but also provided the impetus for marronage.

Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the status and position of enslaved women during the eighteenth century. The daily and seasonal work of enslaved women determined the boundaries within which women had to resist their bondage and their opportunities to do so. This chapter provides a broad understanding of enslaved women’s labor in the Southern and Northern colonies as a basis from which to further examine enslaved women’s fugitivity in subsequent chapters. This chapter demonstrates the diversity in enslaved women’s experiences during the eighteenth century and the gendered resistance strategies they pursued to contest their bondage. Despite the limitations placed on enslaved women’s resistance, they were able to contest their bondage through the liminal spaces of slavery. This contestation had significant consequences for their mobility and the actions that they pursued as slavery became entrenched during the eighteenth century.

The era of the American Revolution was as critical for African American women as it was for Black men and for White Americans who gained their independence from Great Britain. Black women’s various efforts to escape bondage have been viewed as ancillary in the letters and diaries, biographical accounts, and legal proceedings historians often used to support arguments based on analysis of enslaved men or on factors that prevented women from fleeing slavery. Black women’s freedom was intertwined with the movement for American independence, and African American women influenced the military conflict and were powerfully influenced by its outcome.

Although enslaved Black women were marginalized and faced many obstacles to freedom during the Revolutionary era, they asserted their claims to freedom through fugitivity as they invoked the same philosophical arguments of liberty that White revolutionaries made in their own fierce struggle against oppression. At stake in this discussion of fugitive women is demonstrating that Black women’s resistance in the form of truancy and escape were central components of abolitionism during the Revolutionary Era. Thousands of women of diverse circumstances escaped bondage despite their status as mothers and wives. In fact, motherhood, freedom, love and family propelled Black women to escape bondage during the Revolutionary Era; a time when the chaos of war made women’s flight possible due to the breakdown of oversight and colonial authority.

Chapter 2 is an examination of the pre-Revolutionary period. This chapter examines the flight of a mulatto woman named Margaret Grant who escaped slavery in Baltimore, Maryland in 1770 and 1773. This chapter examines the meaning of freedom through a delineation of acts of self-emancipation and places the story of Margaret in the context of the wider Atlantic world. Ideas about freedom are in many ways fruitful to investigate when analyzing the experiences of enslaved women. Bond women expressed their thoughts about freedom in private and public discourse throughout the era of slavery. Their involvement in conspiracies and acts of resistance such as running away is evidence of their willingness to fight for freedom no matter what the outcome. Margaret’s story stands as a microcosm of the lives of other fugitive women in pre-Revolutionary America. Indeed, enslaved women such as Margaret were a dynamic force when measured against the contingencies of Revolutionary America. They gave definitive significance to the concept of fugitivity despite their fragmented histories and the historical fracturing of their identities.

Chapter 3 examines the ideas of the American Revolution and places fugitive slave women at the center of analysis. The impact of Dunmore’s Proclamation and the Philipsburg Proclamation are examined. From plantations, women escaped to cities and towns, North and South, fleeing poverty and malevolence. After the Philipsburg Proclamation, 40 percent of runaways were women. There were regional variations and similarities. In the South, enslaved women pursued refuge in Spanish Florida and with British troops during the Southern Campaign; in the Chesapeake, enslaved women fled to Pennsylvania and other Northern destinations often seeking refuge with British troops in the process of escaping; in the North and New England, fugitive women sought refuge with the British. In each of these regions, fugitive women also endeavored to pass as free women in urban spaces. Indeed, throughout the Revolutionary Era, enslaved women advanced their liberation through flight. The Revolutionary War bolstered the independence of Black women, gave them increased access to their families with whom they fled, and greater autonomy in their daily lives once they reached safe haven.

Chapter 4 examines the obstacles enslaved women faced in escaping bondage in post-Revolutionary America. The case of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved Black woman in Massachusetts who sued for her freedom, captures the tenacity of Black women, who not only resisted with their feet, but also used the courts to gain their freedom. By highlighting the case of Ona Judge, the fugitive slave of George and Martha Washington, this chapter brings to the fore successful escapes in which enslaved women overcame formidable obstacles to freedom. During the post-Revolutionary period, Bett and other enslaved women developed several strategies for overcoming obstacles to freedom. As daughters, mothers, and wives, they contested oppression and invented solutions that defied their status as enslaved women.